Met Office Supercomputer Maps Storm Long Before it Forms

The days of complaining about the weather man may be numbered. Over at The Telegraph, Miranda Prynne writes that a £30million computer used by the Met Office in the UK was able to accurately predict the size and path of a recent storm four days before it had taken shape.

The IBM machine, which is capable of 100 trillion calculations a second, predicted the storm after spotting two areas of turbulent weather over Canada and the United States which met in the western Atlantic forming one large low pressure system. This would normally have been a harmless depression but the combination of a particularly fast jet stream carrying it across the Atlantic to meet a band of unusually warm air over Britain “energised” the depression transforming it into the storm which swept across the UK on Monday.

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